Local Producer Damascvs is promoting his new EP But I ain’t got no water for you with a science fiction infused music video. ‘Revogue’ is a looping, hypnotic track which lies somewhere between the ambience of Clams Casino and the frenetic space jazz of Flying Lotus. It’s ethereal, but with a strong current of unease. This sense of ambient menace is central to the music video, directed by Stuart Kets.
The video details its protagonist accessing a virtual reality simulation, plugging into a cascade of surreal environments. He walks through lush forest vistas, pilots a spacecraft through floating Japanese Torri gates and performs obscure experiments in a flooded corridor. Certain symbolic images are repeated, like as in a dream- an animal skull on fire, blood dripping into shot. But like a bad psychedelic experience, the whimsical settings start to become claustrophobic and repetitive. The sense of freedom turns to panic. It ends on an ambiguous note, with the character unplugging from the program, but unsure if they are still in the simulation or not. Or rather, the simulation has become a virus infecting and distorting reality….
This imagery gives the video a broader cultural resonance. Since the 1980s, when author William Gibson first used the term ‘cyberspace’ in his ground-breaking novel Neuromancer artists have used a variety of visual cues to depict the new frontier of the internet. At the end of the last century, cyberspace was portrayed as a realm somehow distinct from physical reality. With varying degrees of creative success, films like The Matrix, Strange Days and David Cronenburg’s Existenz played on anxieties about society becoming increasingly detached from reality through new technology. (Coincidentally, the cover art of the Damascvs EP references the cult 1990 science fiction film Hardware). But the last decade has seen more ambivalent process where the internet has become layered into every aspect of everyday life. People’s personal lives are increasingly played out online, while social media influences the course of political revolutions and presidential elections. ‘Revogue’ smartly expresses the sense that while the internet has opened up new avenues for human expression, it is also now perhaps impossible to escape.